Abstract
This article examines defining features of East German urban planning—primarily the housing complex and the city/settlement binary—and their relationship to Eisenhüttenstadt, a city founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, an East German socialist utopia. Today Eisenhüttenstadt is home to a novel form of urban renewal in which architects and planners look to the socialist past for inspiration as they imagine a new urban future. I examine the history of socialist urbanism as it was implemented in Eisenhüttenstadt, as well as how residents and urban planners came to understand socialist urbanism in the years immediately following German reunification. I then examine an urban renewal program, started in 2014, that explicitly draws on the socialist past. In doing so, I aim to consider the socialist city not as an architectural form but as a set of practices, spatial imaginations, and ethical commitments that can be reanimated even in a capitalist sociopolitical context.
Keywords
Introduction
As of February 6, 2018, the Berlin Wall has been gone for longer than it stood: twenty-eight years, two months, and twenty-six days. 1 Yet the socialist past continues to inform life in the former East Germany and continues to offer vital lessons for urban development. This article examines the legacy of East German socialist urban planning, and how contemporary architects and urban planners continue to draw on the ethical and social commitments that defined urban life in the socialist imagination. I examine the life and afterlife of East German socialist urban planning to argue that we should conceptualize a socialist city not as a distinct architectural form—though it has often been described as such 2 —but as a set of practices, commitments, and spatial imaginations separable from the political context in which they emerged. Moreover, in doing so, I show that in the former East Germany today, the sense of collective endeavor integral to socialist urbanism emerges in new forms and under new guises.
My research is based in Eisenhüttenstadt, an industrial city located in north-east Germany along the Polish border. Founded in 1950, the city was originally named Stalinstadt, and referred to in official documents as Germany’s First Socialist City, Germany’s Model Socialist City, or, more informally, the Model City. 3 Contrary to popular conceptions of socialist architecture as “an undifferentiated collection of drab and gray concrete mass housing” 4 much of Eisenhüttenstadt is built in the Stalinist Wedding Cake style: tiered, neoclassical low-rise apartment buildings have decorative cornices, colonnades, bay windows, and landscaped courtyards; inside municipal buildings are oversized brass door handles, decorative banisters, and chandeliers whose curvatures recall mid-century modern design. Multi-story socialist-realist mosaics and sculptures line the streets.
Despite its architectural grandeur, Eisenhüttenstadt is a shrinking city. It has lost close to half its population since Germany reunified in 1990, falling from a high of about 53,00 residents in 1990 to 24,633 in 2018. 5 Much of the population decline is the result of the city’s economic reliance on steel manufacturing, a shrinking and increasingly automated industry in Western Europe. At the same time, Eisenhüttenstadt’s population is rapidly aging. As of 2018, 10.5 percent of residents were under age fifteen and 33.4 percent over sixty-five, a demographic structure that foretells future shrinkage. 6 As a result, with support from the federal government, Eisenhüttenstadt’s municipal officials began a massive program of urban restructuring in 2002, with demolitions and renovations currently planned through 2023. 7
This urban restructuring, coupled with federal historic preservation mandates, situates Eisenhüttenstadt as a city attuned to the socialist past. Eisenhüttenstadt’s city center—an area of 232 acres—is the largest historically protected site in Germany, preserved since 1984 for its importance to East German architecture and urban planning. 8 Buildings’ exteriors in the protected zone must be fastidiously maintained, and changes that might affect the city center’s appearance—for instance, the renovation of outward-facing urban elements such as windows or balconies—must be approved by the county historic preservation board. Eisenhüttenstadt was originally planned in 1950 for a population of twenty-five thousand residents living in an area of roughly 308 acres, though it eventually expanded to nearly double its planned acreage and population. 9 Today, much of the city’s urban restructuring is focused on demolishing the neighborhoods not part of that original plan and revitalizing the historically protected city center. As the population shrinks and outlying residential areas are demolished, and as the remaining residents move into the city center, city officials and residents discuss a return to architects’ and planners’ original vision.
This article brings together ongoing debates in anthropology around ruination and urban infrastructures, spurred primarily by Ann Stoler 10 and Brian Larkin, 11 with scholarship across disciplines that addresses socialism’s myriad material, 12 social, 13 and cultural legacies. 14 It also responds to scholarship across disciplines that rejects the binary distinction between socialism and post-socialism in favor of more nuanced concepts that take into account socialism’s continuing presence and widespread influence, such as post-Cold War 15 or “the unmaking of socialist life.” 16
For anthropologists of the former Eastern Bloc, the relationship between material and sociopolitical change has long been a primary concern. 17 Yet unlike much of the existing scholarship, based on research conducted in the years immediately following the Soviet Union’s collapse, I examine these concerns in a fundamentally different era. Today, as socialism moves away from the recent past and toward the realm of history and cultural memory, it seeps into the everyday not through the social infrastructures most impacted by its loss—systems of property ownership, 18 utility delivery, 19 or domestic trade 20 —but through individuals who actualize its lessons in varied, unexpected ways.
As a result, I adhere to anthropologist Ann Stoler’s (re)definition ruins, and her claim that the effects of defunct sociopolitical regimes unfold unpredictably, often emerging long after a regime’s demise. 21 Stoler conceives of ruins as both material and immaterial. They can be monumental architecture but also quotidian elements of material culture. They can be structures of power or social norms; drawing on Franz Fanon, Stoler reminds us that a defunct sociopolitical regime continues to act on and through the minds and bodies of people who were subject to it, even after its political operatives are gone. She therefore urges scholars to consider “not what is ‘left’ but what people are ‘left with’” and to focus “not on inert remains, but on the histories they recruit.” 22
Responding to this call, I examine how socialist urbanism has been understood both during and after the collapse of state socialism in eastern Germany. Rather than ask what defines a socialist city, 23 I ask, “How do we come to recognize a socialist city as such?” Reframing the question shifts the focus away from the built environment and toward urbanism more broadly: the practices, imaginaries, goals, and spatial relationships seen as definitive of the socialist urban experience. Moreover, a shift toward thinking about socialist urbanism through the lens of its retrospective recognition enables us to identify both defining features of socialist cities and those features’ post-socialist afterlives—the “force” 24 that traces of the socialist past continue to exert.
The social and material traces of socialism are inextricably intertwined. Modernist architect Le Corbusier, who greatly influenced urban design in East Germany, famously said that “houses are machines for living in.” 25 And indeed, socialist architects and planners operated as if the built environment were a machine with the power to shape social life. This politicization of urban design became a taken-for-granted aspect of Eastern Bloc culture and, as a result, the built environment of socialist cities, as ideology made material, “contribute[d] to the conceptual worlds” of the people who lived there. 26 At the scale of everyday material culture, Krisztina Fehérváry similarly calls attention to “the socialist state as a material entity—robustly present in everything from Cuban oranges and East German paper napkins to the pseudo-Modernist built environments that became its signature.” 27 It is therefore impossible to identify socialist legacies that are purely social or purely material.
Yet anthropologist Andrea Muehlebach suggests that the social and material remains of the mid-twentieth century do have divergent afterlives. Writing about the post-industrial Italian city of Sesto, she suggests that the historical moment, which gave rise to Sesto’s growth, “produced an incredibly durable set of ideas, desires, and aspirations that might very well outlast the concrete work-processes, objects, and infrastructures within which they came to life.” 28 In Sesto, this means an aspiration for the forms of sociality engendered by industrial manufacturing, even though Sesto’s factories are now shuttered. In Eisenhüttenstadt, ideas about sociality that emerged during the socialist era—an aspiration toward neighborly solidarity, a desire for the serendipitous interactions that arise from compact urban design, and a concern for the longevity of one’s city and community—appear to be outlasting many of the material structures—the factories, public transport, and communal spaces—which were intended to provide the backdrop to their unfolding—the “uneven temporal sedimentation” 29 of socialism’s ruins.
Socialism’s continued presence in Eisenhüttenstadt has real implications for the city’s residents and makes the city a model for other post-socialist, late industrial, 30 or shrinking cities. Urban studies has traditionally defined the urban as the site of expansion: of population, freedom, wealth, material, and industry. 31 Yet Eisenhüttenstadt shows us how imaginations of human flourishing can take shape in cities characterized by shrinkage rather than growth—where an imagination of endless industrial output and social reproduction has been replaced by economic stagnation and an aging, increasingly vulnerable populace. By repositioning Eisenhüttenstadt’s spatial, economic, and population shrinkage—normally indicators of decline—as an invitation to reinstitute the city’s founding principles, city officials have been able to stem population loss, increase population density, and reinvigorate civic engagement. 32 Socialist planning is thus viewed not as a failed project but as an aspiration that can be productively activated in the present.
This article examines one urban renewal program, called Generational Living, that explicitly draws its inspiration from Eisenhüttenstadt’s socialist history. The program’s goal is to revitalize Housing Complexes (Wohnkomplexe), which, originally planned to fulfill the needs of young families, are currently being redesigned to accommodate the needs of the elderly. The success of Generational Living highlights the importance of drawing inspiration from alternative, sometimes defunct, models of urban living and of understanding and attending to local historical contingencies. It also illustrates the power of imaginations of the past—and building projects which draw on those imaginations—to foster a sense of historical continuity and civic pride.
Throughout this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research that I conducted in Eisenhüttenstadt between 2010 and 2016. First, I examine how East German planners conceptualized a socialist city, and how those ideals were implemented in Eisenhüttenstadt. I then examine how both planners and residents experienced the collapse of the East German state and their city’s sudden transition from socialism to capitalism, shedding light on conceptions of socialist urbanism. I close by exploring how the urban renewal program Generational Living draws on Eisenhüttenstadt’s socialist history, and how socialism is recast and depoliticized in Eisenhüttenstadt today (see Image 1).
Otto Schutzmeister’s Space, Earth, Men (1969), 2015, photo by author.
The Emergence of East German Urbanism
On one of my earliest visits to Eisenhüttenstadt, I walked past Otto Schutzmeister’s 1969 mosaic Space Earth Men and remarked to my companion that I liked the astronauts. The mosaic depicts two space travelers floating, arms outstretched, against stylized stars and planets; no colors or icons indicate their nationality. “Those are not astronauts,” my companion told me. We were in the former East Germany—they were cosmonauts. The exchange was in jest, but it indicates the fundamental difference between socialist and capitalist conceptions of space. An astronaut explores astral bodies, isolated points of interest set against blank field. A cosmonaut explores the cosmos, an indivisible field, taking in his or her surroundings in their totality.
East German architects and planners imagined themselves as managers of total space. Their goals were to maximize social engagement among residents, and to infuse architecture, the built environment, and the natural world—walking paths, gardens, lawns, public art—with a sense of harmony and, at times, grandeur that instilled pride in the socialist project. Capitalist architects, in the socialist imagination, merely designed isolated urban elements with the goal of maximizing profit for the builder or investor. 33 Moreover, East German architects, drawing on Soviet practices, subscribed to the logic of teleological planning. 34 Rejecting the logic of liberalism, in which population and economy are independent entities to be managed by the state, socialist architects worked backward from economic and demographic projections; urban sprawl was nearly nonexistent as cities grew to accommodate predetermined population increases, often corresponding to an influx of workers as a factory or agricultural enterprise expanded. Nonetheless, socialist cities—particularly East German cities—differed from capitalist cities not so much in their architectural form, but in the urban imagination that architects and planners deployed.
The ideology around socialist city-building in the Eastern Bloc crystallized around Magnitogorsk, a steel manufacturing city in the Soviet Union founded in 1928. 35 Magnitogorsk was to be a counterpoint to the crowded, polluted cities of capitalist nations, and an emblem of the Soviet Union’s technological dominance. Historian Stephen Kotkin writes that a socialist city “would not be founded on ignorance or superstition but on education and science . . . Magnitogorsk was to be a place of hope and progress.” 36 Unfortunately, the physical form that hope and progress might take had not been clearly defined, and technological setbacks plagued Magnitogorsk’s planners and construction teams. By the late 1930s, there were hundreds of residents—by one account 352 households and 300 cows 37 —living in mud huts in the shadow of what was at the time the largest steel plant in the world.
Nonetheless, when East Germany was founded in 1949 as a satellite to the Soviet Union, East German planners and architects looked to Magnitogorsk for guidance. In April 1950, the East German Building Ministry sent a delegation of six architects to Moscow to meet with Soviet urban planners and architects and develop methods for rebuilding their battered country. The delegation studied Magnitogorsk, as well as the Polish planned city of Nowa Huta, 38 both “instant cities” 39 built according to teleological logics. 40 Upon the delegation’s return, its members composed the 16 Principles of Urban Planning, a list of architectural ideals modeled on the Athens Charta that would guide East German building projects.
The 16 Principles favor sweeping statements extolling the virtues of urban life, beginning with Principle 1: “The city is the most economically and culturally rich form of settlement that human society has achieved.” 41 Yet specific doctrine that spells out architectural choices is minimal, such as a preference for multi-story buildings and ring roads. Some guiding principles of urban planning are common to socialist cities. The Housing Complex comprised the fundamental building block of socialist urban design. 42 It consisted of units generally closed off to through-traffic, which had the amenities necessary to fulfill what informants described to me as the five functions of being: work, leisure, education, food, and shelter. Yet the Housing Complex’s form—apartments with courtyards and nearby services—is not so architecturally distinct from capitalist housing projects designed in the 1920s such as Bruno Taut’s Horse Shoe Settlement in Berlin or the New Frankfurt Settlement designed by Ernst May. Indeed, East German socialist cities tend to favor urban designs that would have been familiar to a mid-century European: a main street with shops and restaurants; apartments for nuclear families with a kitchen, living room, bathroom, and separate bedrooms for children and adults.
The 16 Principles were ratified on July 27, 1950, as part of the Third Socialist Party Congress. Three days prior, on July 24, the Congress had ratified a decision to build a Model Socialist City, a steel manufacturing city that would be the first—and, though no one knew it at the time, most complete—embodiment of the 16 Principles. 43 That city, Eisenhüttenstadt, would be a model of humane urban living. Its products would power the rise of other cities and industries across the Eastern Bloc, resolving the state’s shortage of building materials with steel that would go toward factories and machinery. 44
East Germany valorized Soviet steel production, and in 1952, East German officials invited engineers from Magnitogorsk to revamp Eisenhüttenstadt’s steelworks after an unsuccessful start to production. 45 Yet East German media also derided Magnitogorsk’s haphazard building process. In a 1977 article in the national newspaper Neues Deutschland, written to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the visit from Magnitogorsk’s engineers, journalist Margot Pfannstiel derogatorily described the horse-drawn carts and shovels with which Magnitogorsk was built, called “primitive” in comparison with Eisenhüttenstadt’s cranes. She notes that Magnitogorsk’s first residents arrived on foot, lived in tents, and worked with their hands and shovels, while Eisenhüttenstadt’s first residents lived in heated wood barracks, had access to railroads and other machinery, and were not far from the cities of Berlin and Frankfurt Oder, “with cafés, with cinemas, with civilization.” 46
A socialist city was the embodiment of progress, a better city than anything that had come before—foremost capitalist cities but also previous iterations of socialist cities. After the end of the Third Party Congress in 1950, East Germany’s political leader, Walter Ulbricht, praised the ratification of the 16 Principles, in that they guaranteed that Berlin would never again see the development of “American boxes” or “Hitlerian barracks.” 47 But what was a socialist city? Both East Germany and the Soviet Union had modeled their urban ideal on a negative definition for a thing that was, by its physical and spatial nature, eminently positive.
The City/Settlement Divide
A 1951 East German Building Academy report about Eisenhüttenstadt—then an as-yet-unnamed Model City—introduces a distinction between a “city” and a “settlement” that would become integral to Eisenhüttenstadt’s planning. The new city should neither be a “residential settlement” (Wohnsiedlung) nor “a gigantic worker’s settlement” (gigantische Werksiedlung). Rather, the report states, with an underline in the original, it should be “a city in the fullest sense of the word.” 48 The report goes on to say that this would not be city as cities had heretofore been imagined, in small, medium, and large sizes, or on a scale of cultural vibrancy from minor to major. Rather, it would be a new kind of city, one opposed to a settlement. A settlement was merely a site for lodging. “But the newly imagined city should, fundamentally, offer residents across demographics all the benefits of urban life regardless of the city’s size, particularly cultural offerings.” 49 This new kind of city would not need a minimum population before it could support concerts, theaters, restaurants, and the like. Moreover, workers confined to slums and suburbs would no longer be cut off from culture.
Workers who live in large cities have been, until now, unable to take part in most of the benefits of urban life, because of the distance between their homes and workplaces. Now they will finally be able to recognize that which constitutes urban life.
50
Five years later, in 1956, the Building Academy would declare that the Model City, by then named Stalinstadt, was “a city in the fullest sense of the word . . . the most culturally rich, economically robust, and practical form of settlement proposed or planned” 51 (see Image 2).
Sketch of Stalinstadt by Kurt Leucht, 1951, from The First New City in the German Democratic Republic (1957).
Much of Eisenhüttenstadt’s perceived success derives from its Housing Complexes, which were planned for around five thousand residents. 52 Principle 10 of the 16 Principles states that Housing Complexes should include housing, adjacent gardens, schools, pre-schools, day cares, and “everything that accommodates the daily needs of the people.” 53 The 1951 Building Academy report on the model city states that its Housing Complexes were to provide “all the amenities of urban life,” 54 and lists shops and repair places, administrative centers, buildings for social and communal life, cultural facilities such as movie theaters and public bookstores, and green spaces. 55 Stephen Collier, in Post-Soviet Social, points out that the Russian term for Housing Complex, khoziaistvo, comes from the root khoz, meaning “household,” and represents a shift wherein daily needs would be fulfilled not by the family but by the state, insofar as the state administration both planned and operated the khoziaistvo. 56 The khoziaistvo was a “nexus of need fulfillment,” 57 that could be plugged into an urban plan, reproduced any number of times to accommodate urban growth. While the German word lacks the indication that the Housing Complex was to replace the family, it nonetheless operated in the same way, being the place where residents of any age could seek comfort, entertainment, education, and nourishment—a family household writ large.
Principle 10 goes on to emphasize that Housing Complexes should not have through-ways for cars but should nonetheless not be “intrinsically closed off, isolated forms.” 58 The 1951 report states that Housing Complexes are cells in a larger organism, and that, citing the Sixteen Principles, “their structure and planning depend on the form and needs of the city as a whole!” 59 an exclamation point added for emphasis. Building on Soviet experiences and in contrast to so-called “American Housing Cells”—likely referring to suburbs, which were seen as having a “uniform and one-note, repetitive homogeneity” 60 —this sense of connectedness to the larger city was seen as essential for warding off provincialism, a lack of community, and a lack of civic pride. Housing Complexes were not to be built in “elongated shapes” so that “the ways from the apartments to the social, cultural, and societal centers remain short and a clear orientation from the apartment towards such centers is not lost.” 61 And in contrast to capitalist Mietkaserne—rental barracks, a derogatory name for the cramped tenement apartments in which workers tended to live in urban centers—the Housing Complex would allow its residents ample “air and light” while still providing what “finally once and for all . . . can be identified as an ‘urban life.’” 62 The Housing Complex represented, according to the Building Academy, “a synthesis between the desire for the best possible sunlight, air, quietness, and proximity to nature on the one hand, and on the other hand the necessity of an appropriate spatial density and proximity to social and cultural establishments.” 63
In October 1950, the East German Building Ministry appointed architect Franz Ehrlich to design the new city, though his designs, deemed unsatisfactory, have not survived. 64 A subsequent plan first devised by Kurt Junghann and revised by Otto Geiler provoked debate as to whether it more closely resembled a settlement than a city. The plan included rows of apartment buildings surrounded by lawns along evenly sized and evenly spaced streets, not unlike American suburbs. Among other criticisms, Building Minister Luthar Bolz declared that the monotonous design was not representative of “a city of a new type,” 65 and unfavorably compared the design with that of Wolfsburg, a West German new town often cited as Eisenhüttenstadt’s counterpoint. 66
The Building Ministry commissioned new plans and, on April 19, 1951, chose the submission by Kurt Leucht, 67 an architect who had helped formulate the 16 Principles. 68 Leucht’s plan introduced the self-contained Housing Complexes that one finds in Eisenhüttenstadt today, numbered in the order in which they were built, intended to be traversed by foot or bicycle, and encircled by roads for cars—though a defined urban boundary has long been a defining feature of German cities. 69 Still, the Building Academy praised Leucht’s plan, as well as the Housing Complexes’ comprehensive amenities—schools and shops, day cares, dairies, Young Pioneer houses, laundromats, and barbers 70 —which offered residents the population density, walkability, access to services, and architectural variation that had come to define a city in the socialist imagination.
The Socialist Scaffolds
Scholars have long debated whether socialist cities are architecturally distinct from capitalist cities. Stephen Kotkin cites a 1973 Soviet conference on the definition of a socialist city, where participants debated whether there was a fundamental difference between socialist and capitalist cities. According to several scholars, “their answer was a qualified yes,” 71 citing characteristics such as high population density and the presence of heavy industry. However, one participant called these characteristics “a symptom not a cause” of living under socialism, recalling a politburo member’s 1931 declaration that “Soviet cities were socialist by their virtue of their being located inside the USSR.” 72
Architectural historian Sonia Hirt describes two schools of thought on the matter. The ecological school espouses the idea that the growth of urban centers during the twentieth century resulted from the rise of industrial production, and that cities built during this period reflect changing patterns of family life, commerce, and building practices common to both socialism and capitalism. The historical school believes that socialist governance—the government’s control of property ownership, construction, and industry—resulted in architecturally distinct forms, outlined most comprehensively by Ivan Szelenyi. 73 According to the historical school, a socialist city was defined by clearly delineated urban borders, monumental architecture—building project that pays no heed to property values and wasteful uses of prime real estate—an economy centered on heavy industry, and an aesthetic defined by prefabricated concrete architecture. 74
Eisenhüttenstadt, however, bears few of the architectural hallmarks that Szelenyi and Hirt describe. It is a city of Stalinist neoclassical buildings that, shortly after its founding, came to incorporate the neighboring medieval villages of Fürstenberg and Schönfließ, with their single-family homes and narrow cobblestone streets. Eisenhüttenstadt’s monument to fallen Soviet soldiers, a large public square in Housing Complex 1, was inserted into the city’s design not because of a preference for monumental architecture but to act as a bridge between the area built according to Geiler’s plan and the rest of the city designed by Leucht. 75 While socialist cities built after the advent of prefabricated concrete architecture do tend to be more architecturally uniform, there are nonetheless numerous outliers that do not conform to this set of identifying characteristics. Nowa Huta, Poland, like Eisenhüttenstadt, has a large proportion of neoclassical Stalinist architecture. Satellite cities built during the latter part of the Soviet era, such as Marzahn in East Berlin, or Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk, Russia, are not centered on heavy industry.
I am therefore more inclined toward a third point of view, reminiscent of the 1931 politburo member whom Kotkin cites and articulated by architectural historian Kimberly Zarecor, that “the most critical distinction between socialist and capitalist cities was the integrated role that the city played in the state project of socialism.” 76 Socialist cities relied on what Zarecor terms “the socialist scaffold,” in which the city was a node in a national network: it was intimately and deeply dependent on the state for the delivery of utilities, food, and household goods; for the exportation of its products; for the planning and construction of its built environment; and for any population, economic, or spatial growth. 77 While the nationalized economies of socialist countries often did result in uniform architectural characteristics both within and across national borders—particularly as European socialist countries began exporting their prefabricated concrete designs to socialist trading partners around the world, such as Vietnam and Tanzania 78 —it was the socialist sociopolitical system, rather than any aspect of urban design, that made life in socialist cities distinct.
The socialist scaffold can also be interpreted as a description of the city itself. Not only did the city rely on the scaffolding afforded by socialist governance, but it was itself a scaffold which supported the new, more equitable forms of social life that were to unfold within it. Its urban infrastructures 79 operated both practically and poetically, to use anthropologist Brian Larkin’s conception of “the poetics of infrastructure.” 80 Urban infrastructures, Larkin contends, “need to be analyzed as concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees.” 81 Like speech, which conveys information beyond the referential meaning of words, at the same time that infrastructures in Eisenhüttenstadt served a practical purpose—the street lamps oriented nighttime traffic or the pipes delivered water—they also communicated to their interlocutors that they were situated in a city, rather than a settlement. They made an appeal: this is “a city of a new type,” 82 as Luthar Bolz put it, “a city in the fullest sense of the word.” 83
Herbert Härtel moved to Eisenhüttenstadt in 1955 to work as an architect; he would go on to serve as chief architect from 1958 to 1967. In 1955, the city was still in the throes of its first phase of construction and suffused with optimistic poetics—the belief that, as one propagandistic publication put it at the time, “a crumb of German earth harbored a whole new world.” 84 Yet, Härtel told me, when he first arrived in Eisenhüttenstadt, the mayor sat him down and offered advice. “Remember,” the mayor said, “that people do not climb into their moving vans as members of the bourgeoisie and emerge from them socialists.” Residents’ commitment to the socialist project would emerge slowly, as their neighbors welcomed them into socioeconomically diverse social groups, as they came to value urban cultural amenities, or take pride in the collective maintenance of greenery and public spaces. Härtel should not expect that his buildings alone were capable of engendering an attachment to the new city or to the ideals of socialism (see Image 3).
May Day festival, 1960, courtesy of Norman.
Indeed, in his own life, Härtel came to see that the mayor’s advice had been astute. Härtel’s apartment building had a degree of socioeconomic diversity that he had theretofore never experienced. The director of the city’s hospital lived in his building, along with teachers who, like himself, were highly educated, and factory workers and other wage laborers who were not. Yet all eight families socialized together. Their children would play in the courtyard, while the adults had coffee, dinner, or drinks. They began to take pride in this social unit. The collective care of their apartment building and lawn was mandated by the city government, but through these activities, the building’s residents cultivated a sense of unity, particularly through sportsmanlike competition with the residents of neighboring buildings.
Härtel analogized his building’s social cohesion to the experience of residents who, having moved to Eisenhüttenstadt from rural areas, had to learn the strictures of urban living. He told me that one family attempted to keep a goat on their balcony, and that you could always tell where former farmers lived because, in the city’s early years, they would pile firewood outside their front doors. The piles of firewood corresponded to the number of former farm families in a given building, until finally these residents learned that it was easier and more cost-effective to heat their homes with coal briquettes, and the piles of firewood disappeared. 85
According to Härtel’s logic, it was foolish to assume that people who had never before lived in a socialist city would know what kinds of behaviors were expected from them—be it because Eisenhüttenstadt was socialist, or because it was a city. Housing Complexes whose services fostered multiple points of daily contact among neighbors indeed provided the spatial and material foundation for residents’ embrace of cross-class solidarity. But that embrace also required poetic encounters with urban infrastructure informed by the material and immaterial scaffolds that upheld socialist collective life. With time, a citizen would come to perceive her apartment building as a primary social unit, interpret a well-kept lawn as a point of pride and an embodiment of collective labor, or feel a well-heated home as representative of the state’s provisioning.
Capitalism, Laundry Rooms, and Bratwurst
In 1993, at age eighty, Kurt Leucht would reflect on his efforts designing the Model Socialist City. He praised its fundamentally urban character, a coordination between residential, commercial, and industrial development that, he suggested, would not have been possible under capitalism. In the 1970s, the Building Academy codified such coordination in algorithms intended to determine the ideal ratios between urban elements—apartments, transportation infrastructure, recreational facilities—such that neighborhoods, serving diverse needs, would enable the “complete development of the personality in a socialist society.” 86 Indeed, Leucht calls the city a “homunculus” in the mind of East German planners. 87
Yet Leucht was disappointed that the geographic and visual center point of his plan, the Culture Palace, was never built. It would have been a central meeting place for the city’s residents, and an embodiment of Leucht’s belief that dedicated communal spaces are necessary to cultivate neighborly relationships. A “community [Gemeinwesen],” he said, “must be brought together in publicly accessible facilities. Community [Nachbarschaft] cannot be left to its own devices.” 88
Eisenhüttenstadt was built with attention to population density, communal space, and walking accessibility between apartment buildings, schools, workplaces, and cultural amenities. Yet the material infrastructure that allows for communal life to flourish—the shared spaces and physical proximity—is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the kind of social life that existed under socialism. Following the collapse of the socialist state, residents saw a social shift swiftly follows the sociopolitical shift, as the city’s social infrastructure disappeared, and the Model Socialist City soon came to house a capitalist social world.
Helga Böhme moved to Eisenhüttenstadt in 1961. She was for many years the chairwoman of her apartment building’s House Society, organizing seasonal cleanings and social events for residents. The Society kept a book with residents’ birthdays and made sure that no birthday went by uncelebrated—a practice that today, Helga said, would be considered a breach of data privacy. While a portion of citizens surely participated in House Society activities drudgingly—better to go through the motions than discover the political consequences of abstaining 89 —many embraced what they saw as a welcoming and inclusive social environment.
After reunification, Helga tried to keep the spirit of the House Society alive. She had a scrapbook of socialist-era House Society mementos, she still attempted to organize social events—though she had had the same €30 in a drawer for years, unable to get people together who might spend it on beer and snacks—and she went out of her way to make new neighbors feel welcome. But Eisenhüttenstadt’s residents no longer looked to their apartment buildings as a source of friendship, let alone transgenerational and cross-class solidarity. Shortly before we met in the winter of 2015, Helga, by then a white-haired woman in her early nineties, had seen a moving company bringing things into the building. She asked one of the moving men about the people moving in, and he barked in reply, “Why do you want to know? What are you, from the Stasi?” Helga told me that she was “totally horrified” and dropped all efforts to get to know the new neighbors (see Image 4).
Helga and her neighbors on their roof deck, undated, courtesy of Helga B.
But when I asked Helga what the most impactful change had been for her following reunification, she told me it was the loss of the communal washing machines. The top floor of her building had had two washing machines and a centrifugal dryer that were shared among the building’s residents. After reunification, “in the blink of an eye,” the washing machines and dryer were taken away. It was a real shame, she said, because when you have to share that kind of thing, that’s how relationships are cultivated. She knew it was a small component of friendship, but when you had a list in the laundry room where every one of the building’s thirty-three households signed up to use the machines, you knew, “Ok now Frau Schultz is doing her laundry,” to use Helga’s example, and you could go up and chat when she was done and it was your turn. You had small, serendipitous interactions, and you kept other people in mind. Helga and her neighbors protested the removal of the washing machines, even setting up a collection fund to offset the increased electricity costs that their real estate company would incur. But their efforts were to no avail.
Helga had believed that there was something special about the socialist city. She had lived through the Allied bombing of Berlin, and she felt like she had no choice but to participate in a social movement that strove for a different kind of world than the one that had produced the rubble and destruction of her early childhood. And in essence, she was the perfect mark for the Building Academy’s ideology. From its adoption of the Housing Complex to its development of algorithms and later, as historian Annemarie Sammartino points out, its embrace of Jane Jacobs, the Building Academy, understood the success of socialism not in the ability to produce large quantities of industrial goods or in the success in imbuing citizens with a belief in socialism, but in the everyday practices of ordinary citizens and in their interactions with one another.
90
But the deep commitment to collective life that emerged out of everyday practices such as the ones that Helga recounted could not exist outside of the sociopolitical structures that fostered the poetic responses to the everyday that socialist planners intended. One therefore sees the divide between the necessary and sufficient conditions for neighborly social engagement borne out, as the social environment changes and the built environment—particularly the area under historic preservation—stays more or less the same. Leucht was right to say that community cannot be left to its own devices, but he stopped short of saying that community requires dedicated physical space alongside the social norms and infrastructures that shape our engagement with the built environment.
In a 1990 letter to architect Gabriele Haubold and her former husband, Leucht wrote that although a city can have a communist unity of work, housing, and leisure, “there is no such thing as a socialist city and can never be, any more so than there can be a socialist bratwurst.” 91 (In the brief letter, Leucht does not explain what he sees as the difference between communism and socialism, and he appears to use the terms interchangeably.) Leucht actively participated in debates in the East German Building Academy about how to avoid the pitfalls of capitalist cities—their sprawl, their monotony, their overcrowded slums. But those debates were ultimately about how to build the ideal city. When that city functioned under a socialist regime, it was a socialist city. Haubold explained to me that Leucht was proud of the city he had designed—equating Eisenhüttenstadt with a bratwurst was not meant to malign it—but his letter expressed his belief that while a city might reflect socialist ideals and embody a socialist planning process, it ultimately cannot be socialist in form. Just as it was ridiculous to think that a bratwurst could be socialist, so too was it ridiculous to think that a city could express a political orientation outside of the regime that operated within it.
Transitioning to Capitalist Property Ownership
Today Eisenhüttenstadt stands out among German cities in that, as was the case during the East German era, private property ownership is exceedingly rare. During the socialist era, much of the city was considered property of the VEB Gebäudewirtschaft, the Peoples’ Own Real Estate Company, a state entity founded to manage real estate in the new city and referred to by the abbreviation GeWi. Following reunification, the GeWi retained its real estate holdings but became a private corporation, as was common practice for East German state-owned real estate companies.
The GeWi works closely with the Eisenhüttenstadt Building Cooperative, or Eisenhüttenstädter Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft, known by the acronym EWG. The cooperative dates back to 1953, when a national uprising in response to poor working conditions, including substandard housing, forced the East German government to approve the formation of building cooperatives, which would independently carry out the design and construction of residential buildings with funding from the state. 92 Like the GeWi, the EWG retained ownership of its buildings following reunification. Thus, unlike in other post-socialist regions, in which “fuzzy” property relationships created a vacuum of ownership and land management following the collapse of socialism, 93 Eisenhüttenstadt experienced a fairly seamless transition, with a capitalist real estate landscape that continues to closely resemble that of the socialist era. 94
Because the vast majority of Eisenhüttenstadt’s property is owned by two corporate entities, the GeWi and EWG, comprehensive, citywide urban renewal projects can be more easily implemented than in cities in which each building has a different landlord, each pursuing their own self-interest. In Eisenhüttenstadt, the GeWi and EWG work closely with each other and with the city government to coordinate urban renewal projects, under the logic that all three will benefit from a thriving, well-ordered city. 95 Perhaps the very presence of urban renewal projects, borne of this coordination between inherited real estate structures, can itself be interpreted as a legacy of Eisenhüttenstadt’s socialist origins.
Generational Living
Jens Beige, an architect currently working on urban renewal in Eisenhüttenstadt, learned his craft during the socialist era. People in the United States, he told me, did not realize that, as was instilled in him under socialism, “city planning is the management of space.” Beige described the attention he took toward the placement of benches and trees. No tree is placed by happenstance, no path whose orientation was not considered. Beige told me that individual experience was the object of a socialist planner’s imagination. Eisenhüttenstadt was built for a populace without cars—individual car ownership was rare in East Germany in the 1950s—and was meant to be experienced on foot. When I first met Herbert Härtel, he took out a map of Housing Complex 2, and traced how an individual might drop his kids off at school before walking to the bus stop, catching the bus to the steel plant, how the kids would pass a kiosk and buy candy on their way home, each movement anticipated. Beige too described the flow of movement from an apartment building, to a shopping area, and coming to rest in a pub. “You have to really go through it,” he said, “every step is carefully thought through.”
Contemporary urban renewal programs continue to draw on this socialist spatial imagination, anticipating the movements and needs of residents, while maintain an awareness of atmospherics, totalized space, and integrated planning—the contemporary term for harmony between commercial, residential, and municipal sectors. Moreover, contemporary projects aim to revitalize the Housing Complex as “a nexus of need fulfillment,” 96 and the efforts have won national commendations.
In 2014, the GeWi and EWG embarked on a project, funded primarily by the federal program Urban Renewal East, aimed at renovating apartments to accommodate the elderly, residents with impaired mobility, and, to a lesser extent, young adults. The project’s first phase was executed in Housing Complex 1 and called Generational Living (GenerationenWohnen); in 2015, the project won the German Contractors’ Prize in Renovation. 97 The project’s second phase, in Housing Complex 4, is called Reasonably Priced Living (PreisgünstigWohnen) and renovated buildings more sparely such that rents would be less expensive than in Housing Complex 1. It is intended to serve elderly residents on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. In 2018, Eisenhüttenstadt’s city center revitalization efforts won a special commendation from the German Urban Planning Prize, which cited Generational Living, Reasonably Priced Living, and a third program, called Accessible Living (Barrierfreie Wohnen), located in Housing Complex 2 and focused on meeting the needs of mobility-impaired residents. The Urban Planning Prize committee highlighted Eisenhüttenstadt’s integrated planning and long-term vision, wherein the renovation of cultural, commercial, and municipal buildings in the city center has led to increased interest among residents in the renovated apartments in Housing Complexes 1 to 4. 98
The city’s focus on meeting the needs of aging and mobility-impaired residents comes in response to the city’s aging population, as well as the city’s lack of existing accommodations for the elderly. Population projections made in 1960 anticipated that there would be 197 residents over age seventy-five by 1980, and the city’s nursing home was originally planned with two hundred beds. 99 For all its valorization of progress in science and technology, the East German state imagined that life expectancy would remain as it was in 1960: sixty-six for men and seventy-one for women. 100 Yet life expectancy steadily rose throughout the twentieth century. As of the 2014 census, over 15 percent of Eisenhüttenstadt’s residents—4,371 of approximately 28,000—were over seventy-five. 101
When planning for Generational Living began in 2014, many of the apartments in Housing Complex 1 had been empty for years and were in severe disrepair. Windows and heating systems first installed in the 1950s were drafty and inefficient by modern standards. Buildings’ once-painted facades were uniformly brown and ununiformly crumbling, such that the brick layer beneath was visible in patches. 102 According to the Federal Ministry for Building, Interior, and Heimat—a difficult-to-translate word meaning a deeply rooted sense of home—the neighborhood’s bleakness “necessitated a new engagement with the substance of historic preservation. It was no longer sufficient merely to undertake a detailed renovation,” restoring decrepit architecture. 103 Rather, it would be necessary to renovate more fundamentally, to orient the Housing Complex’s renovation “around its reactivation and reanimation [Wiederbelebung]” 104 —in other words, to renovate the neighborhood not only to raise the standard of living but to revitalize its original social mission (see Image 5).
Unrenovated apartment buildings in Housing Complex 1 (foreground, left), renovated apartments, (foreground, right), and apartments under renovation for Generational Living (background, left), 2015, photo by author.
During the socialist era, residents were primarily imagined as living in nuclear family units and, as a result, children’s daily needs were given precedence: each Housing Complex had a day care, kindergarten, elementary school, and play area. Today the kindergarten and elementary school in Housing Complex 1 are gone, and its kiddie pools are filled in—though their outlines can be discerned where the grass grows a little darker than in the surrounding area. Instead, Generational Living is repurposing the infrastructure of need fulfillment to fulfill the anticipated needs of the elderly and disabled.
At the geographic center of this plan is the former grocery store in Housing Complex 1—the city’s oldest—which has been transformed into a multi-use building as part of Generational Living. On the first floor are a physical therapist, an office of the charity Volkssolidarität, which provides services such as visiting nurses, home health care aids, and meal delivery, and a multi-purpose meeting room. Above is a ten-bed, fully staffed group home for the mentally disabled. 105
In addition to revising their imagination of need fulfillment to accommodate Eisenhüttenstadt’s shifting demographics, planners also aim to recuperate the social life envisioned under socialism. As described by Kurt Leucht and residents such as Helga, shared spaces and public meeting places—coupled with adequate population density—were seen as fostering the serendipitous interactions that strengthen community. The former Housing Complex grocer, in the middle of a centrally located courtyard, is part of the material infrastructure that undergirds daily social interaction.
So too are balconies, which have long been an object of discussion in Eisenhüttenstadt. Many residents told me that what separated a socialist city from a capitalist one was a lack of balconies, which forced residents to spend their leisure time in communal areas. The area of Housing Complex 1 where Generational Living was implemented has been retrofitted with exterior balconies, as well as interior balconies, overhangs in the stairwell that connect to apartments, for use in inclement weather. Some Generational Living buildings also have skylights in the stairwells to improve the ambience of the interior balconies.
One therefore finds a recuperation of the old end—a sense of community forged via the built environment—by new means. To think of a lack of balconies as promoting social life entails residents who can walk up and down stairs to socialize in gardens or at the pub. With Generational Living, people with limited mobility can sit on their balconies to chat with neighbors, wave to people going by. The effort to build interior balconies in addition to the more common exterior ones underscores the importance of creating material infrastructures for fostering loose social ties, the types of superficial yet meaningful interactions typified by Helga’s memory of saying to herself, “Frau Schmidt is doing her laundry now.” Seeing and recognizing neighbors’ faces recuperates an atmosphere of familiarity and neighborly intimacy now lost to a culture of private car ownership, supermarkets, and big box stores. And in doing so, it also recuperates the poetics of the city/settlement divide: the pride and satisfaction that comes from living in a place that promotes social ties and community well-being, where those in power seek to address their citizens’ holistic needs.
Generational Living has been popular beyond planners’ expectations. By the time renovations were completed in 2015, all 130 apartments had been rented, drawing in people from surrounding villages and reversing—or at least slowing down—the city’s decades-long population decline. In addition to the developments discussed above, two-bedroom apartments were reconstructed as one-bedroom apartments—more attractive for single people or couples without children at home—and apartments were renovated to allow for wheelchair accessibility, with amenities such as elevator access and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. 106
Jens Beige, the architect who has worked on many of Eisenhüttenstadt’s urban renewal projects, told me that Housing Complex 1 “is coming back to its roots.” As a result of Generational Living, residents’ daily needs would be fulfilled, and loose social ties reinforced. Residents who were often excluded from the social order, such as the mentally and physically disabled, would be integrated into the neighborhood’s daily life. And once residents saw how these superficial niceties improved their quality of life, they would embrace the use of communal spaces, wave from balconies, and rebuild the unity of social and material infrastructure that socialist planners once imagined. “It’s all still there—it works,” he said, referring to the apartment buildings, commercial buildings, courtyards, and walking paths that formed the backbone of each Housing Complex. Housing Complex 1 “is coming back to its roots.” He banged on the table. “Do you understand this circulation?” He moved his index finger in a circle, as if tracing a globe.
We are turning back to the same spot, like on a globe. We’re coming back. Everything that our colleagues developed back then [during the GDR era] on the basis of societal principles, we’re retracing it—we’re trying to revive and reinvent it.
Yet the underlying logics of capitalism make Generational Living more a reinvention than a revival of socialist urban planning. The city/settlement divide emphasized that cities could spring forth fully formed, like Athena, or Leucht’s homunculus, regardless of population size or residents’ purchasing power. Capitalism, however, trades in desire, attraction, and hope. As the German Urban Planning Prize committee highlighted, the increased population density in Eisenhüttenstadt’s city center has led to increased commercial activity, further attracting new residents—an upward spiral of increasing urban vibrancy in which Generational Living takes part. Today, as in the past, Housing Complex 1’s material and social infrastructures work together to support residents’ engagement with their neighbors and neighborhood. But the Housing Complex’s new iteration is a mimetic reproduction of socialist urbanism, borne from and upheld by notions of supply and demand antithetical to socialist planning. As such, Generational Living represents a novel form of urban life, one in which a semblance of socialist social life attracts the types of transactions—renting apartments, patronizing local businesses—that render a neighborhood desirable in a capitalist context.
Despite the fact that much of Eisenhüttenstadt’s urban policy focuses on meeting the needs of the elderly, the Brandenburg state government implies that young people will determine the city’s future. In addition to Generational Living’s 130 apartments for the elderly and disabled, 66 apartments have been renovated for young adults—hence the project’s name and emphasis on serving diverse generations. 107 Drawing on statements put out by the Eisenhüttenstadt city government, the Brandenburg Agency for Building and Transportation notes that it is of particular significance that the reinvigoration of socialist planners’ original vision starts in the first Housing Complex. The habitation of these same buildings seventy years ago spurred the city’s first period of flourishing. Perhaps, the hope seems, while the city’s elderly live out their last days, a new generation can spur on a second period of flourishing, reanimating the social commitments and attachment to place typified by Eisenhüttenstadt’s earliest inhabitants (see Image 6).
Buildings renovated for Generational Living, 2015, photo by author.
These young residents may not recognize their neighborhood as bearing a resemblance to life under socialism. I am reminded of an activity I observed at Eisenhüttenstadt’s high school, where students threw a bean bag to each other and, upon catching it, were asked to say the first word that came to mind when they thought of East Germany. One student said, “the Allies,” and his classmates laughed. But it revealed the fact that for some, socialism belongs to a hazy past, indistinct within Germany’s twentieth-century tumult.
Writing about ruins, Stoler reminds us that “much depends on where we look for detritus, what we expect it to look like, and what we expect to see.” 108 Young people or those unfamiliar with socialist history—recent immigrants, for example—may not approach Generational Living as the potential site of socialist detritus. They may not draw the connections, “not readily visible,” 109 that identify ruins as ruins. Yet the continued preservation of Eisenhüttenstadt’s city center—the continued presence of the 16 Principles made material—keeps the history of socialist urbanism available for those who choose to look for it and are imaginative in what they expect to see.
Conclusion
Throughout this article, I have sought to explain, first, how socialist urbanism was imagined in East Germany and how it was implemented in Eisenhüttenstadt. Second, I have shown how both residents and architects in Eisenhüttenstadt came to conceptualize the socialist city—particularly after reunification—as a social project that relied on the built environment for its necessary but not sufficient conditions of possibility. And third, I have illustrated how the planners and government officials who work on contemporary urban renewal projects draw inspiration from and instrumentalize the socialist urban imagination.
The socialist past has no doubt left an indelible mark on Eisenhüttenstadt. In closing, I ask, what happens when the characteristics of socialist urbanism, while present, are no longer recognized as such? It remains possible, and indeed likely, that as socialism recedes into the past and becomes a latent part of the city’s history and cultural memory, 110 elements of the urban environment once seen as defining features of socialist urbanism might begin to take lives of their own, “vital refigurations” 111 divorced from their socialist origins (see Image 7).
Leninallee, today Lindenallee, undated, from author’s collection.
In 2016, I came across a sign erected next to garbage bins in Housing Complex 2. The sign depicted untidy, overflowing bins with the phrase Spur der Schweine, trace of pigs. I could not help but think that in Eisenhüttenstadt, such a sign was a play on the title of the well-known and controversial East German film Spur der Steine, trace of stone, which tells the story of workers building a factory in the 1950s, a time, place, and history closely tied to Eisenhüttenstadt’s origins. Yet for residents unfamiliar with East German culture, the sign was likely read only an appeal not to live as if in a pigsty.
Eisenhüttenstadt’s most recent Urban Development Plan, produced by the city government in collaboration with an urban planning consulting firm, describes the importance of publicizing Eisenhüttenstadt as “the city of short distances.” Easy access to the city center and centrally located services, such as those in the former grocery of Housing Complex 1, would serve the needs of elderly and mobility-impaired residents, who can neither drive nor walk long distances. At the same time, the report explained, a more compact urban center would reduce the city’s carbon footprint, and thereby “equally serve the needs of both accessibility [for the elderly and mobility-impaired] and environmental protection.” 112 A city of short distances harkens back to Leucht’s original vision of an urban environment meant to be traversed on foot—recall the East German Building Academy’s restriction against “elongated shapes” that limit a Housing Complex’s walkability 113 —though under vastly different social circumstances. The added emphasis on environmental protection seems likely to recast the Housing Complex not as a remnant of socialism but as an environmentally sustainable form of urban development.
Socialist urbanism in Eisenhüttenstadt is thus becoming part of a new, richer, and more layered history. The materiality of Eisenhüttenstadt’s Housing Complexes keeps socialist urbanism alive as a historical substratum. Yet the hybrid of socialist urbanism and capitalist commerce represented by Generational Living separates the ideology of socialist urbanism from the East German regime. After all, as Kurt Leucht acknowledged in his letter about the socialist bratwurst, the built environment alone cannot convey sociopolitical messages, and Generational Living includes no plaques or other material indications that its planners were inspired by the socialist era.
Moreover, the young people expected to forge a new Building Generation—as the original inhabitants of Housing Complex 1 were called 114 —are imagined as doing so not because they believe in reviving Eisenhüttenstadt’s original mission but because they have embraced a reanimated socialist scaffold: a shared understanding of the urban as a site for serendipitous encounters and collective engagement. Young people who wave to their neighbors in Housing Complex 1 or smile at the sign in Housing Complex 2—who, in essence, enjoy the ruins of socialism without knowing it—are producing a new iteration of socialism’s legacy, transmuted from its political origins.
The potential to prescind the socialism from a socialist ruin is perhaps best exhibited in Eisenhüttenstadt’s Documentation Center for Everyday Culture in the GDR, a museum of East German cultural history founded in 1993 by historian Andreas Ludwig. Ludwig grew up in the American sector of West Berlin and came to East German history as an outsider. At first, the museum aimed to represent East German material culture to both Westerners, who could marvel at the eastern equivalents for familiar everyday objects, a shadow world hidden behind the Iron Curtain, as well as East Germans who could marvel at the unified, politicized aesthetic that had once defined their everyday lives.
However, when I first met Ludwig in 2010, he told me that he had begun work on an overhaul of the museum’s permanent exhibition, sparked by an encounter he had had with a school group. (The new exhibition opened in 2012, shortly after which, for unrelated reasons, the museum changed leadership.) Ludwig had come across a group of children marveling at an East German typewriter. When he inquired about the source of their fascination, they told him that they were trying to decipher how this old-fashioned machine worked; they knew it was intended to produce printed matter, but, familiar only with ink-jet printers, they could not figure out where the paper came out. They had never seen a typewriter before.
As time goes on, a socialist thing’s relationship to socialism—particularly mid-century, Eastern Bloc socialism—may no longer be its most distinctive or defining characteristic. The children’s interest in the typewriter was not a result of it being an East German typewriter, but rather that it belonged to an alien temporal and technological moment. As such, it was just a typewriter. So too might a Housing Complex be merely that, and not a former socialist Housing Complex, and Eisenhüttenstadt a city that thrives despite shrinkage, rather than a renovated Model Socialist City. The current revitalization of the socialist urban imagination embodied by Generational Living might set a new process of circulation in motion such that, generations hence, Eisenhüttenstadt’s capitalist present, in which the socialist past is smuggled as in a Trojan Horse, will be the model for its future renewal.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Samantha Fox is no longer affiliated with The New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The National Science Foundation (Award 1425679), the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Columbia University Department of Anthropology and Heyman Center for Humanities, and the Council for European Studies.
